Month: November 2011

by Doctor Science

I first heard about SOPA (the Stop Internet Privacy Piracy Act, H.R.3261) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act, S968) several weeks ago from Sprog the Younger, who said Tumblr was up in arms about it. I figured the kids were getting overexcited — no-one *really* could want to throttle the Internet like that.

But she was right. They really are that bad, and they really do have a good chance of being passed.

A Dew Drop Falling from a Bird’s Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider’s Web, by Joan Miro. Wake up!

When even A List Apart, a low-key, techie, web design industry site best-known for articles like CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death (it was a game-changer! really!) or Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design — made a political statement about it, I got scared and got real.

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by Doctor Science

William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market. I can’t figure out if the bears in this close-up:

are looking for more money inside the bull they’ve eviscerated, or are angry because it turned out to be a hollow, bubble-y sort of bull.

In July Bill Domhoff, sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, posted An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%, written by a long-time acquaintance who works in the business (and who wants to stay anonymous, not surprisingly). He emphasizes that there are two distinct sets in the “top 1%”:

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by Doctor Science

Still Life with Turkey Pie, by Pieter Claesz.

As far as I’m concerned, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival[1], where we acknowledge how grateful we are that there was enough to eat this year, and that we’ll have enough to eat this winter. We’ve been members of a CSA for almost 20 years now, and one of the things it’s done has been to give us an old-fashioned gut sense of how fragile food production is.

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by Doctor Science

I’ve been poking at a follow-up to my first post about Hamlet’s Father, Orson Scott Card, and child abuse for a while now, but the revelations out of Penn State last week make it all too hideously relevant.

Basically, I think Hamlet’s Father is about precisely the kind of abuse there was at Penn State. It’s not a very good story because OSC only put in the abuse, not the cover-up and complicity of people around the abuser. IMHO he left out the cover-up because he didn’t let himself explore the true nature of the situation he was describing, and he did *that* because he can’t let himself acknowledge the truth about the abuse that scarred his own life. But there *is* a really good story in there, asking to be told.

Stained glass from the Elsinore Theatre, Salem, Oregon.

I am cutting here for:

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.

SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.

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by Doctor Science

Apparently this is the year for TV shows based on fairy tales. I know a bunch of people who are following Once Upon a Time but only few who are following Grimm. Among the latter, though, are a number of German-speaking fans who are watching mostly to mock mercilessly.

The premise of Grimm is that “a cop discovers he is descended from an elite line of criminal profilers known as “Grimms,” charged with keeping balance between humanity and the mythological creatures of the world”. The Brothers Grimm were of course the first (or best-known) of this line, so, very unusually (uniquely?) for American TV, the show uses German names for supernatural creatures and phenomena.

Gustaf Tenggren 1923 illustration for Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In the 1930’s Tenggren was one of Disney’s top illustrators, working on Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. He knew it was important for fairy-tale heroes to be weak and desperate, not big and bad-ass.
Image via.

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by liberal japonicus

I happened to come across this youtube vid, nice funky song.

Trombone Shorty, according to his wikipedia page, either started playing trombone at the age of 6 or started fronting a band at that age, though I suppose, given the way he plays, both are possible. But below the fold is the jaw dropping stuff

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by Doctor Science

I just finished reading Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds. I highly recommend it for giving some real sense of how and why Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most popular and influential American novel of the 19th century.

One point I hadn’t appreciated before is how huge “Uncle Tom plays” were for shaping American popular culture. I knew that Stowe’s novel had epic sales, though I hadn’t realized how important it was in Great Britain, where it sold a *million* copies in its first year (all without any money coming back to Stowe, as this was before international copyright). But it was the stage productions that really brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin to most Americans — they were the first true American mass culture performances.

Although the main roles were usually taken by white actors in blackface, Tom Shows were also the first opportunity for many African-American entertainers to perform for white audiences. This photo of a Tom Show performance is from the University of Virginia’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture archive, a fascinating and invaluable resource.

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by Doctor Science

As I hope you all know, Mississippians are going to be voting on a “Fetal Personhood Amendment” on Tuesday. The amendment states:

The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.

Now, the American Family Association (among others) says

the inclusion of the word cloning in the proposed Amendment is designed to prevent cloning embryos for fetal experimentation and does not in any way condone cloning

I suspect that this is a lie. What they are *trying* to do is to get around the problems twins pose to the idea that human life begins at fertilization.

Twins Sarah and Ann with their mother, Elizabeth Gay Bolling, by Mathew Pratt, 1773. The objects the babies are holding are teething/pacifier/rattles of coral and gold. I don’t blame Mom for looking a bit staggered about the eyes.

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